potato print onesies (baby shower project)

Inspired by a similar project from Martha Stewart Living and the potato printing projects of my youth, these are a fun, fast, simple project for a baby shower. We made these at a shower I hosted for one of the moms from our preschool, expecting her second baby. 

Potatoes make good stamps for printing on paper or cloth. Cut them into simple shapes, use foam brushes to apply fabric paint (we used Kid Made Modern fabric paints from Target's selection of kids' art supplies), then stamp shapes to make pictures or scenes. After dry, heat set with an iron, and they're ready to wear!

 

Linking up to:
I Should Be Mopping the Floor

ducks' pond birthday cake

I started out with plans to make a bottle cap cake, but the kiddo started looking at the cake books and really wanted his dad's birthday cake to have ducks on it.

These were made using the directions in What's New Cupcake?  by Alan Richardson and Karen Tack. We used marshmallows instead of donut holes for the heads and mini chocolate chips for the eyes, but otherwise the ducks are pretty close to their predecessors. We chose the "melted frosting" approach to coating the ducks, which was a success.

The pond is colored buttercream through a star tip, and I used chocolate rocks and confetti sprinkles around the edge of the platter for the shore.

And yes, it looks more appropriate for a baby shower than a grown man, but the Mr. was a good sport about our kiddo's decision to add some ducks into his birthday celebration.

But sometime soon I'm going to try again to make the bottle cap cake I'd planned on. Unless my kiddo's agenda sounds more fun.

Are you working on any non-conventional food lately? Anybody else have kids who like to play art director?

Thanks for reading!

ode to turquoise (via an old door)

This is how I left you at the end of my arbor post, with the new white arbor, and primed door trim . . . and the antique door of the studio looking shabby in some reject paint from the hardware store from several years ago. 

Our Adirondack chairs, on the other hand, are painted in this friendly shade of turquoise, or pool blue. It looks happy and intentional, wheras that old door looked pretty sad and unwelcoming. Worse, I'd say, than when my brother brought me the old door in the first place, with peeling white paint.

We can mark the door off of our never-ending to-do list; I took advantage of the nice weather to prime and spray it, and now it's just as happy and friendly as our chairs. It gives the whole building a different character. (The color is Rustoleum's Aqua.)

Of course, it helps that the sun was shining that day, which always makes things look brighter and happier than on a cloudy day, but I'm giving the new paint an equal share of the credit.

Okay, just that quick update for now, but I've been weeding and planting and working on the yard a bit more since painting the door. You can bet I'll be posting about those adventures very soon.

In the meantime, thanks for reading!

delusions of grandeur part 4: cartoon portrait cupcakes

I won't lie: I've been a bit overwhelmed. The past couple of weeks have been an absolute marathon of projects. Not only was I competing in So You Think You're Crafty?, but I've also been making a ton of stuff for my kiddo's birthday and trying to keep up with book covers at work. And so, last night, with the party over and the party mess carted from the community center back to our living room and kitchen, I went to bed at 10:30 pm for the first time in months.

But let's back up for a minute:

First, I was eliminated from the competition last week, with my upcycled Sunburst Mirror project. Now, I don't really feel like my project deserved to do as poorly as it did, but admittedly, I was ready for competition to be over (so I could focus on birthday stuff). So when the other competitors ratcheted up their voter drives on the last day (don't ask me how), I maintained radio silence and decided to let the chips fall where they may. And fall they did.

And so I worked on robot decorations and cakes and giant crepe paper chandeliers and . . . well, let's just say there are a ton of party posts in our future, readers.

Now, my kiddo's party was all about robots, but he also has a thing for cake lately. He can't get enough of the duck cupcakes on the cover of What's New, Cupcake, for example. So we had to make a batch of cupcakes for our monthly play group last week.

After carefully studying all of the cupcakes in Hello, Cupcake, my kiddo kept coming back to the funny face cupcakes. When I asked if he wanted our cakes to look like him, I got an emphatic, "Yes!"

We used the recipe in the book to doctor a cake mix using buttermilk and eggs, then tinted cream cheese frosting and used a mix of candies for the faces (he picked green shoelace candy for the mouths).

Finally, to cartoon-ify his crazy hair, I filled a Ziploc bag with a mixture of white chocolate and butterscotch chips + two drops of yellow food coloring and melted them together. Then I snipped a corner and squirted out some wild hair squiggles onto some parchment paper. When they'd hardened, I cut slits into the cake and poked in the hair.

Ta-da! Pretty quick and easy. And he was one happy kid, looking at all those little cartoony hims.

Anyway, I like to do a little warm-up cake project before doing a big all-day cake (like last year, when I made the rainbow cupcakes before the Zelda cake) and these guys fit the bill. I'll be posting the robot cake soon . . . it was a little more time-consuming than these cuppies, but you might like it anyway. :)

Thanks for reading!


p.s. you can make these photos larger by clicking on them, but you probably already knew that! clever you.

daffodil treasury

And now, for a palette cleanser, here's a bright, cheery little Etsy Treasury list featuring daffodils. Please enjoy!




Link here.


(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)

Fabulous!

I like everything about this!



I like the packaging design, I like that it's available in a bunch of colors, I like that you don't have to get messy dye-fingers, I like that there are different formulas for natural and artificial fibers, and I like that I can buy it locally from Oregon Art Supply. Before this, I had to special-order dyes for polyester and nylon.


http://www.dharmatrading.com/html/eng/5590684-AA.shtml
http://www.oregonartsupply.com/